Sound art emerged in the People's Republic of China (PRC) around 2003. A substantial part of the scene makes abundant use of street sounds and other field recordings. These soundscape projects experiment not only with sound, but also with social engagement and critiques of urban transformation. I argue that Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle helps us to understand this under-researched scene, because Debord puts forward a question that also lies at the heart of sound art in China: is critique of the political system possible in contemporary societies?

The Revolution Will Not be Televised

The Society of Spectacle radically opposes any kind of social separation. According to Debord, social separation lies at the root of inequality, suppression and alienation, it obstructs historical development (as defined by Marx) and in the final analysis, is an attack on life (cf. Debord 1994: Proposition 25: 171).

This fundamental problem is not only masked by the modern media; from the first proposition quoted above, the major contribution of The Society of Spectacle is its insistence on the fact that mass media and culture in general are structurally only capable of fueling social separation. In other words, Debord's notion of the spectacle pushes the Marxist adage of culture as the opium of the people to its logical extreme. He argues that since all culture is by definition divorced from reality (theatrically commenting upon, reenacting, escaping from, aspiring to reality), it is by definition part of the immense accumulation of spectacles. Even for critique, there seems to be no possible solution to this dilemma: